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CSP 60
The Economics of Public Issues and Public Policy [Moore]

Information Found Here!

Starters 
Books
Articles
Websites
More Help
 Topic Starters and Idea Generators
Encyclopedias and other types of reference sources are useful for answering questions. They offer convenient overviews to your topic, timelines, background and other information, often with bibliographic citations providing additional sources for your topic. 

Go to our Reference Shelves and browse around the call numbers H97 [Political Planning] HA [Statistics] & HB-HD [Economics – Theory, History, Planning, Labor], HF-HJ [Commerce, Finance, Public Finance]. Below are some specific reference sources you may find helpful:

Dynamics of Economic Well-Being
Dictionary of Economics
Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History [Electronic Resource]
Encyclopedia of American Public Policy  
Encyclopedia of Policy Studies
Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy

Books: OASys and LINK+
OASys is Oxy's Catalog, which lists books, journals, online resources, and other library holdings. The LINK+  catalog combines the holdings of over 30 participating libraries.

To get started, you might try a keyword search in OASys. Be sure to notice the subject headings for the best items on your topic. Click on those headings to get more resources. Need more? Click over to LINK+ and continue your searching there. Need even more? WorldCat includes over 54 million entries from more than 45,000 libraries. You may place Interlibrary Loan requests. (Slower than LINK+)

Suggested Keyword Searches for this Course

Keywords will differ depending on the focus of your research. Here are some obvious examples.
 

keyword: Health Care
keyword: Medicare
keyword: domestic policy
keyword: Social Security

keyword: income tax reform

keyword: markets

keyword: credit

keyword: drugs

Tips:
Remember to be flexible with your terminology and try several different searches.
Use synonyms.
Truncate terms to retrieve records that mention all variations of the word in question.
To narrow search results, limit your search to certain locations [Book Stacks, Special Coll] or to specific Material Types [Elect. Resource, Text (Book)].
Caution: In a library catalog, keywords are usually found in the Notes, Title, and Subject Headings fields. Therefore, keyword searches may produce huge results or results that include the keyword(s) but be irrelevant to your topic.

Suggested Subject Headings for this Course

Drugs – United States – Costs
Economic Policy
Economic Policy - California
Economic Policy – United  States
Economics
Economics - United States
Education – Economic Aspects
Health Care Reform -- Economic Aspects
Medical Economics
Political Planning
Taxation

Advanced searches, combining subject headings with key words or phrases, yield a manageable number of targeted results. Here are a few examples:
[Subject] Economic Policy AND [Any] education - (Fill in your topic focus in the place of "education".)
[Subject] Policy AND [Any] (econom* OR finance) Limited to: Year after 2007
[Subject] (Health Care OR Medical Care AND [Any] statistics - (Try replacing "medical care" with your topic focus.)

For more assistance with searching for books, please see Finding Books.

Articles in Magazines, Newspapers and Journals
Articles provide a variety of information ranging from entertainment to scholarly research. To search for articles you use indexes or databases that may include more than one type of article.  Learn how to recognize and distinguish between the different types of publications (academic, popular, etc.) and select the articles that fit your need the best.
For clues to identifying various citations, click here 

Selected Library Research Databases for CSP 61: 

EconLit (First Search)
Index to articles in economics with links to full-text (when available).

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers (Trial)
Find and retrieve initial reports and findings of researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

PAIS International (CSA)
Public Affairs Information Service index of articles, books, conference proceedings, government documents, book chapters, and statistical directories covering contemporary social, economic, and political issues and the making and evaluating of public policy. Includes the PAIS Archive. Searches find citations to documents originally published and indexed from 1915 to the present. Links to full-text (when available).

LexisNexis Statistical
Online access to citations and abstracts from American Statistics Index (ASI). Statistical Reference Index (SRI), and Index to International Statistics (IIS), with full-text access to a large collection of tables searchable by content and arrangement. See also LexisNexis Academic.

Business Source Elite
Get articles from more than 1,100 scholarly business journals, and citations and abstracts from over 1600 titles. Nearly half of the included journals are peer reviewed. Also includes very detailed profiles of the world's 5000 largest companies.

CQ Library
Oxy collection of databases from Congressional Quarterly includes CQ Public Affairs Collection, CQ Supreme Court Collection, CQ Researcher, and CQ Weekly.

If you are pursuing a multi-disciplinary approach, be sure to look at the wide range of databases available here at Oxy. DATABASES by Topic.

For more assistance with searching our databases, please see Finding Articles.

Web Sites
Like other information resources, Web sites may include personal opinion, deliberate hoax, credible information and scholarly material. It is very important for you to critically assess the information resource itself, as well as its content.

Some Criteria for Evaluating Information

U.S. Census Bureau
 www.census.gov/

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)
www.bea.gov/

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
www.bls.gov/

National Center for Education Statistics
 http://nces.ed.gov/index.asp
 

Try a different search engine or a subject directory found on our Public Internet Search Tools page. For example, go to the Librarian's Index to the Internet, and try this search: California AND "health care".

 For more assistance with searching for web sites, please see Finding Public Web Pages.

 

This is an archival page and is no longer maintained on a regular basis. If you would like to have this page updated, please contact Marsha Schnirring at mschnirring@oxy.edu or x2542.


Page created by Nick Velkavrh.
Page last edited on 09/22/2008.
Reviewed by Marsha Schnirring on 02/27/2008.

We welcome your Comments and Suggestions.

 

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